There are a lot of browsers these days, some being bloated with features, others serving the bare minimum of web browsing tasks. Marco Peerboom began developing his minimalist web browser xxxterm for OpenBSD in 2010. Within a year the browser became popular enough in the OpenBSD community to find its ways to major Linux repositories. And here's why.

"There are also Conkeror and Firefox with Vimperator extension which feel lightweight in their behavior, but is there still anybody who really believes that the words Gecko and lightweight belong in the same sentence?"

Like, really?

Gecko for the record isn't more bloated than webkit.

Firefox uses xul-runner for all the GUI which is what makes it feel slow at times (since you probably don't know anything about nothing, xul is a javascript UI that is rendered by Gecko and is responsible for the slightly longer load time, UI delays and customizability)

And the article goes on and on with anti-Firefox claims which are all baseless. WTG OSnews.

Firefox uses xul-runner for all the GUI which is what makes it feel slow at times (since you probably don't know anything about nothing, xul is a javascript UI that is rendered by Gecko and is responsible for the slightly longer load time, UI delays and customizability)

Don't You see a contradiction in Your words? Gecko is fast, but Firefox is slow because Gecko slowly renders it's UI, optimised for Gecko.